Author: Diane

Over the past two weeks, including the weekend, I’ve been quite busy doing a client edit that turned into a major rewrite. Writing uses up most of my creative energy….

Every so often, generally about once a year, I give the blog a bit of a facelift. This is mostly to keep it looking up to date. Recently, I changed…

Okay, at the start of this week I’d hit a brick wall and was struggling with whether or not to have a “supporter” character in my story. I’ve been playing…

This feature is in association with NetGalley. Murder in the Med, Peter Mayle Thanks to NetGalley and to Bloodhound Books for an advance copy of Murder in the Med by…

Now, when I say “special” I don’t mean “special” as such, I mean “other important characters not mentioned already”. According to Ron D Voigts and Writing the Killer Mystery, these “special”…

The intention was to take The Beast Within away with us on our recent holiday and do some work here and there … Unfortunately, we were so busy enjoying ourselves that…

We had a fantastic three weeks off work. We went camping for only two of them, but we were determined to have a break from everything else as well, and…

I had a lot of fun working on my killer this week. Wednesday was the day I did this work, and I didn’t even reach the end of the chapter…

This feature is in association with NetGalley. The Quartet Murders, JR Ellis Thanks to NetGalley and to Thomas & Mercer for an advance copy of The Quartet Murders by JR…

Details of the victim have been percolating in the back of my mind this week, while I did other stuff. When I finally came to sit down and write the…

I have been a Windows gal for as long as we’ve been using Windows. I remember when the first Microsoft products started to come out. I started off on WordStar…

I didn’t get very much work done on the novel at the weekend as we did shopping and gardening on Saturday, the poet had a gig Saturday night, and we…

We finally caught up on “I is for …” yesterday, for the alphabet adventurers. It’s been a long time coming – 6 months since our last outing – and, boy,…

I didn’t do any more work on the novel on Tuesday, so I wrote the grand total of 197 words, bringing my running total to 464. Instead, I carried on…

Having abandoned – temporarily – Catch the Rainbow, yesterday I started work on The Beast Within: a Marcie Craig mystery. Marcie Craig is the main protagonist and amateur sleuth in…

Thanks to everyone who took the time to reply to last week’s post – here, on Facebook and elsewhere. The general consensus is that I finish the book and, on…

*** AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION REQUESTED *** For the past four weeks there has been an inquest into the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974. Much of my book, Catch the Rainbow, was…

After much hand-wringing and some discussion with friends and colleagues, I made a tough decision and sent a particularly heavy edit back to the author yesterday. It was taking me…

I had a relatively productive day yesterday. I stuck to my schedule and kept on top of the household chores. I did some writing work, a blog post, and some…

I didn’t have chance to do any writing on Thursday evening, as the poet had band practice and I had to do the shopping. So we had a quick tea,…

This feature is in association with NetGalley. The Mistress of Pennington’s, Rachel Brimble Thanks to NetGalley and to Aria for an advance copy of The Mistress of Pennington’s by Rachel…

We had a relatively still night. When the wind drops, it’s actually fairly mild – currently around 11 degrees Centigrade, but with plenty of sunshine during the day. However, at…

We’re in the midst of another massive storm here in the UK and my internet connection keeps blowing out – on the phone and on the broadband. Fortunately, I can…

We had another long weekend, this time for my birthday. And this time, it was more of a chilled, relaxing time. We saw the poet’s mum on Friday evening, and…